5 areas of IT that are on the rise

Byron Connolly |
June 15, 2015

Service brokers, SaaS, IDaaS, ArcOps, and the ‘sharing economy' are the future, says Vito Forte.

"Normally, if this doesn't work out, we then build a walled garden and throw everything in the middle and set all the troops up around the outside with bows and arrows hoping to keep the bad guys out."

Identities are no longer the domain of a single organisation, said Forte. There's a lack of a perimeter for organisations that are dealing with a large distribution of customers, employees and partners.

"The key thing here is around identity. Do we put all these people in our directories?" he asked. "How do you validate identities? Do you ask people to give you a 100 point check before you give them an email account? Why would we do that?"

Forte said that most consumers are now logging into many services with their Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn IDs.

"Why don't we take advantage of that?" he asked. "This will reduce the reliance on a whole bunch of internal infrastructure to work out 'who is who in the zoo'," he said.

He said organisations 'sort of get this wrong anyway' so there's an opportunity to learn from consumer-oriented capabilities.

4. The rise of ArcOps

Although DevOps — a concept aimed at improving interaction between app developers and IT operations staff — provides agility and helps to speed up application deployment, IT teams need to start earlier at the architecture level, said Forte.

"Architecture is about strategy execution and that's it. So if you are not executing on those particular elements, and following it through to see if you have architected something that actually delivers value, why are you doing it in the first place?

"To deliver with velocity, we need to architect for operations, not just develop. Architecture is not an island of perfection," he said.

He questioned how a chart with 75 million lines that is only understood by one person creates value.

"Who takes ownership of delivering that? The conversations I have heard in the past have been: 'Well the reason that failed is because you, being operations, didn't understand what I designed.'

"Well whose fault is that? Aren't we on the same team?" he said.

"So making that end-to-end capability responsible from the architecture piece right through [to completion] is really important and can drive a lot more value.

"It does upset the architects though but that's OK — that's the whole point of disruption," he said.

5. The rise of the 'sharing' economy

Forte believes we have barely scratched the surface of the potential of the sharing economy currently driven by innovators like Uber, Airbnb and Airtasker.

The disintermediation that has occurred with companies like Uber means we are "basically excising infrastructure", he said.